Letter to a Godchild: Concerning Faith
In the year 2000 acclaimed author Reynolds Price became honorary godfather to Harper Peck Voll. As a christening gift, Price composed a letter to the child, one intended as a brief guide for Harper's spiritual future. The letter sketched the crucial roles which faith had played in Price's own life and whittled down those lessons the author felt were most valuable. Later, Price realized that in a rapidly complicating world, his thoughts might also be useful for other children and their parents. Here, then, is an expanded version of the original letter -- an eloquent, thoughtful, and inspiring look at faith from one of the most revered American writers and most respected students of religion.
In Letter to a Godchild, Price recounts how his life has been shaped by numerous and varied spiritual influences -- from the Bible-story books his parents bought him before he could read, to the childhood days spent exploring dense woods near his home (woods where he searched for arrowheads and spied on numerous wild animals), to Sundays at church with his father and mother, his travels around the world to magisterial structures as various as St. Peter's and the old Penn Station, and years of study both in and out of the classroom. With no trace of self-pity, he explains how his faith grew and deepened when in 1984 -- after a life of robust health -- he suffered a cancer that eventually led to paralysis of his lower body.
Letter to a Godchild includes striking pictures of the buildings, objects, places, and events that have deepened the author's religious sensibility. He has also compiled a comprehensive section on further reading, looking, and listening that provides suggestions for books, art, and music that will entertain as well as enhance this volume. A profoundly intelligent and moving explication of religion and spirituality, Letter to a Godchild is an exhilarating experience for readers of all faiths.
Customer Review: duke professor's spiritual advice
This slender volume originated as a gift to Reynolds Price's godson back in the year 2000. He has expanded the original letter in order to describe "succinctly, and as honestly as I could manage, the advancing line of my own religious life, [so that] I might provide a useful sense of how one person's existence shaped itself round an early inexplicable event and moved onward from there till now, the start of my eighth decade" (he was born in 1933). His intention is not to write a children's book, or even a book to read to children, but to produce "a document that would be genuinely helpful to a friend in his early adult years."
The "inexplicable event" that Price mentions was a vision that he had when he was only six or seven of a wheel that symbolized the intimate unity of the vast complexity of all life, all of which was cared for by a benevolent power. Combined with beloved Bible story books, and then his own reading of the Bible, Price wrote himself into the narrative of the Christian story early on. By age seventeen he knew he wanted to be a writer and a teacher, and by any measure he has enjoyed enormous success and acclaim--professor of English at Duke University since 1958, author of thirty-seven volumes of fiction, poetry, essays and plays that have been translated into seventeen languages, and a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
After graduating from Duke and then Oxford University, Price began his tenure back at Duke. By that time he still understood himself to be distinctly and intentionally Christian, even though his "renegade" faith has expressed itself ever since in decidedly non-institutional and unorthodox ways. At age fifty-one tragedy struck when he was diagnosed with cancer of the spinal cord. Subsequent treatments resulted in the entire paralysis of his lower body. At this point Price recounts a second vision, more vivid and profound than the first, of standing in the Sea of Galilee, where Jesus washed his massive surgical scar and pronounced over him words of healing and forgiveness. In his mind he was miraculously healed, for against the medical prognosis of his doctors, Price survived both the cancer and the barbaric radiation treatments. He writes eloquently about how his life has flourished in far richer ways because of his paraplegia. In the last few pages of his testimonial Price offers his godson practical advice for spiritual formation, including suggested readings, serving the poor, identifying with saints, and frequenting sacred spaces.
Customer Review: The Gospel According To Price
In this the third Reynolds Price book "concerning faith", he ostensibly is writing to a godchild, Harper Peck Voll, who is still a child. Price is aware that when the youngster grows up, he may have no interest in what the writer has to say on the subject. One suspects that Mr. Price is in the company of that rather large number of other writers who keep private journals and their letters to friends and family over the years while their real motive is in publishing for a wider reading audience. If that were not the case here, there would be no need for Mr. Price to publish this latest book on faith.
Mr. Price bases his faith on traditional Christianity although he acknowledges other religions and says that they work too. He has not attended church since his youth because of the organized church's silence on race. (He could have included the church's outspoken shrillness on homosexuality as well.) He is not interested he says in converting anyone to his beliefs. He is completely certain that he has had two revelations from the Creator, one as a small child, the other after his diagnosis with cancer when Jesus appeared to him to inform him that he had been healed.
It would be fair to say that one has to accept Price on faith by faith. He like the rest of us-- with the exception maybe of the most rabid of fundamentalists-- picks from the religious tree only the fruit that appeals to him.
Every time I read Mr. Price on religion, I am reminded that he is a much better fiction writer than a theologian. Case in point: there is a very sweet and moving account in the book of Harper's [though he is only eighteen months old] seeing Mr. Price's wheelchair for the first time and then pushing a long coffee table out of the way of Mr. Price and his chair. That is Price at his best.
